The Emergence of Colonial Societies, 1625-1700

Introduction

Several aspects of a country and its colonial experience affect the prospects of democracy. The first, often neglected, is the nature of the preexisting society. Except where the native population was virtually eliminated, as in certain settler colonies of the Americas, indigenous cultural traditions survive. These have complex, sometimes contradictory, and often still potent implications for the development of democracy. In Latin America, for example, authoritarian cultural legacies often attributed to the colonizers had roots in the precolonial societies, such as those of the Aztecs and the Incas (Ciment, 20).

The Emergence of Colonial Societies during 1625-1700

In America groups with different indigenous cultural legacies absorbed and reflected the colonial experience in politically divergent ways during 1600 to 1700 era. This divergence was particularly so among the constituent nations of the American Empire, which emphasized "indirect rule." Thus, in the politically centralized, culturally authoritarian American north, army rule actually reinforced the power of the emir as absolute ruler, while American administration of the more decentralized, participatory, and constitutional societies of southern Nigeria allowed for the emergence of their more democratic tendencies in modern politics. The other English-speaking foreign rulers—Australia (in Papua New Guinea) and the United States (in the Philippines and Puerto Rico)—and the Dutch (in Indonesia) apart, the imperial powers, exercised "direct rule"—control by representatives of the overseas government. Hence the subject population usually lacked experience in self-government before obtaining independence.

Furthermore, the same colonizer could administer different societies differently, depending on what the prospective colony had to offer. America, unlike England, was governed directly by them and has been more authoritarian since independence. Where mineral resources were particularly abundant and indigenous populations large, as in Peru and Mexico, or where slaves were imported for plantation agriculture, as in Brazil or the Dominican Republic, colonial rule by the Spanish and Portuguese was particularly intrusive and exploitative. In parts of the New World where both of these features were lacking, as in Uruguay, Argentina, or especially Costa Rica, Spanish control was less penetrating and authoritarian (Gibson, 60).

The American Pattern

The timing of foreign invasion also affected what potential colonizers wanted and could use from their colonies, which in turn affected their legacy. The American pattern established in the 1600s and 1700s in UK and the Americas differed from Britain's mode of operation in nineteenth-century America and Western world. The later instances of colonization, which occurred after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, concentrated much more on the control of production than did early colonization, which had focused on the control of trade.

More significant perhaps for democracy, the early American colonization of Asia and the Caribbean, along with certain other islands such as Mauritius, gave these countries much longer and deeper contact with American values and institutions as well as more time for the gradual emergence of indigenous representative institutions. With the American colonial presence dating back to the seventeenth century, both India and Jamaica, for example, had several centuries of contact with the American and many decades of experience ...